Tools design (was Re: Metacard support)

[Alex Rice]

On Dec 8, 2003, at 1:55 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
> ...and in some cases positively.  Geoff Canyon's Navigator is very 
> powerful,
> but like Emacs it's not as intuitive as less powerful alternatives.

I keep thinking about this one Richard. It's apropos for me because I 
am a die hard Emacs user, but not (yet) a Rev Navigator plugin user. I 
keep hearing how powerful Rev Navigator is but I have yet to penetrate 
the GUI enough to grok it.

As for Emacs- in retrospect the only reason I sat down and studied hard 
and made the real effort to learn Emacs enough to become really 
proficient with it was: because I worked with some folks who where very 
experienced Emacs users. I saw how productive they were, how quickly 
and precisely they could edit many files and buffers. That really 
piqued my interest.

So I need to look over someone's shoulder and see with my own eyeballs 
how powerful Rev Navigator is. How about some animated demo stacks, 
Geoff? :-)

> In many cases there is a trade-off between learnability and usability. 
> ...

Maybe always?

Unlike Kai who thought he could paint-in the usability, or Apple's Aqua 
(the HIG du jour), or Windows (take the Windows Explorer GUI and clone 
it). Instead as xplatform, 4GL developers we should take practical 
steps in our apps by designing with use-cases, and making learnable, 
usable interfaces.

Larry Constantine says "An effective architecture allows users to move 
freely from one set of facilities to another [acquisition, transition, 
production], rather than forcing them to think and operate in one 
particular mode across the board." _Software for Use_ in chapter "Once 
a Beginner: Supporting Evolving Usage Patterns".

> Meanwhile, multi-platform developers sit in the middle of the OS wars, 
> like
> third-world countries trampled in the proxy wars of the Cold War era, 
> trying
> to decide if the confirmation button in a dialog should be on the 
> right as
> in Mac OS or on the left as in Windows. ::sigh::

Another reason I like _Software for Use_ is it's platform agnostic for 
the most part. Most of the screen shots are from Windows apps, but it 
doesn't matter re: the message. Instead of having blind faith that 
Apple or Microsoft will give us the true answers in their HIG, Software 
for Use has real world, common sense, psychologically valid, useful 
stuff. I can only hope to one day have heeded most of the advice in the 
book! <http://www.foruse.com/>

But at the end, the question about placement of the dialog confirmation 
button will still be unanswered because the Software for Use analysis 
would maybe only lead us to conclude "wait, that confirmation dialog 
was just a hinderance to begin with" and get rid of it. :-)


Alex Rice <alex at mindlube.com> | Mindlube Software | 
<http://mindlube.com>

what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable  -Ani DiFranco